This 8-week course will explore the building blocks critical to creating the big idea, the foundation for every meaningful dialogue between brands and customers.

This course is great for aspiring creatives looking to build a portfolio, clients and account people looking to get a better understanding of the creative process, as well as younger art directors, designers, and writers.

Together, we’ll explore the value of strategy, techniques for concepting, execution, and ways to pull the big idea through all components of an integrated campaign. You will benefit from the expertise of guest speakers from top agencies, and have the opportunity to share your work and have your portfolio critiqued as you develop it.

Classes run for two hours, one evening a week for eight weeks. Here are a few of the topics we’ll cover:

Everyone works hard. Everyone “knows somebody.” What makes you stand out from other creatives are your ideas. So your ability to concept, and generate ideas on all platforms, stages and screens are what determine if you'll have success in marketing or any field you choose. Whether you’re a current creative who wants to build your portfolio or someone who’s thinking about becoming a creative, this course will help you learn how to come up with ideas and how to bring them to life. You may be an accomplished presenter, be strategic, and have strong interpersonal skills, but at the end of the day ideas rule. Your ideas are your currency. Your ideas will get you a raise, get you promoted, get you a new job and new opportunities.

This 8-week course will meet once a week in the evening for two hours. Each week you’ll get an in-class assignment, and a take home assignment. You'll work in all mediums, including digital, social, experiential, and traditional, because you must be a hybrid talent. We’ll be discussing how to think like a customer, what an idea is and is not, how to come up with ideas, how to use improv and collaborate, and bring an idea to life. You’ll be sharing your work as you develop your ideas for class assignments and your personal portfolio.

Account Managers play a pivotal role in contributing to the creative and strategic process. It is critical they understand how to communicate and work as a team with their agency counterparts to achieve their company's marketing goals.

This course will provide insights, tools and learning on all aspects of becoming an outstanding Account Manager and strengthening agency relationships. It's designed for Account people at in-house as well as external agencies.

Social Media Analytics:How To Develop, Measure and Optimize Your Social Media Campaigns

DATE:September 20, 2017

TIME: 1:00PM-5:00PM

INSTRUCTORS:

Chris Gil, Director Social & Content Systems, Arnold Worldwide

Jane Shclover, Manager Social & Content Systems, Arnold Worldwide

PRICE:$450 member | $525 non-member

LOCATION:Arnold Worldwide, 10 Summer Street, Boston

ABOUT THIS COURSE:

At this point, you likely have a social media presence. You are creating content for your website but you may not have a real sense of how it is performing. You are on multiple social platforms without a clear goal in mind. And to complicate matters, you are not entirely sure which metric to look at when evaluating performance.

This class is designed to help you re-focus and simplify your strategy through the lens of performance marketing. It is broken up into two broad sections:

The first is a “how-to” guide on establishing a new framework to ground your social and content strategy. This framework will allow for simplification as it related to varied social platforms, new ad formats, multiple key metrics, and loads of data.

The second is a step-by-step guide on setting up your platforms to properly measure performance. These are the fundamentals that enable effective optimization of your social and content campaigns.

As an add-on, we will also dive into the most under-utilized free services that can be used to inform creation of your advertising campaigns.

This full-day workshop covers essentials of persuasive writing and includes hands-on exercises, critique, and practical problem-solving. We analyze what works and what doesn’t. We cover techniques to get the most out of strategies, make concepting more productive, drafts stronger, and the final product harder working. Do bring in a project that’s giving you agita. It’ll be part of our practical problem-solving!

Managing people is the key to success at any job. This highly interactive workshop will provide managers with the tools to effectively manage up, down and across to achieve greater productivity. Participants will develop an individual action plan to manage their relationships with their supervisors, achieve successful delegation, and manage across in a more productive way.

Course content will include:

Managing Up

· Managing your supervisor and adding more value to your role· Identifying what kind of communication your supervisor needs· Understanding the importance of being solution oriented

Delegation

· Identifying the language and tone for successful delegation· Understanding the role of accountability and follow up· Using delegation as a tool to create individual opportunities for growth

· A communication styles assessment to determine your style and recognize the style of others· Discussion and role plays to flex your style and adapt to others · Assessment of current tasks and tools to determine how to move things off your plate and delegate in a constructive way· A personal action plan to achieve a stronger working relationship with your supervisor and understand the fundamentals of managing up

In today’s dynamic digital marketplace, it’s not enough to build a strategy that only aligns a digital marketing channel with a business goal. Consumers — users of the digital technology we leverage for our campaigns — are savvier than ever, desiring information and experiences on-demand. And, they’re empowering the choices for where they spend their time, effort, and money with research. They are growing increasingly skeptical of any branded content that may secretly try to sell them something.

In this course, we’ll explore a high-level overview of the strategic process, diving deeper into how the intersection of consumers and technology has created a shift in what target audiences now want, need, and expect. We’ll also review the basics of user behavior and psychology as they pertain to the consumer journey, identifying marketing opportunities that create positive user experiences.

After this course, you will be able to:

Understand how to begin building a digital marketing strategy

Identify the reasons behind changes in user behavior along the consumer journey

Brainstorm marketing tactics that create positive user experiences

Articulate consumer attitudes and use-cases for each main digital marketing channel

Pre-requisites: Basic familiarity with email, SEO/SEM, blogs, influencer marketing, social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.), messaging apps (Snapchat, WhatsApp, Messenger), display, and native advertising. We will not be reviewing a 101 of these platforms in this course; we will be exploring their strategic applications and roles within digital marketing campaigns.

Patricia Hambrick, Principal and Founder, The Hambrick Group & Senior Lecturer, Boston University Questrom School of Business.

PRICE:$550 member | $640 non-member

LOCATION:Boston TBD

ABOUT THIS COURSE:

The goal of this workshop is to help develop skills that result in developing the best creative executions to meet the marketing and business goals and objectives. Whether you are writing the brief, approving it or using it to evaluate creative, this class will provide you with the tools you need to get the best strategic thinking out of your team. The training focuses on how to write clear and concise briefs so that the creative team can develop multiple on-strategy breakthrough executions.

We’ll cover the following topics:

·Purpose and role of the Creative Brief

·Who should develop it

·Who should use it

·Who should manage it

·Techniques for writing through the eyes of your customer

·Techniques for writing insightful briefs

·Techniques for using the brief to inspire the creative team

·Techniques for evaluating and selling the creative based on the brief